One of the most difficult skills to teach children and adults who have limited learning abilities is an understanding of the concept of money and the relationship between different monetary units as well as the closely related skill of change making. However, a facility in the everyday use of coins and bills is a very valuable fundamental skill for such students to acquire in order that they may be functionally integrated into society without systematically being taken advantage of in their everyday money transactions.
In the past, these skills, if taught at all, have been presented somewhat unsystematically. Typically, exemplary transactions have been laborously repeated in a context which did not take full advantage of diverse, but interrelated, aspects of the individual transactions which can be directed and concentrated to provide the most effective and lasting impression on the mind of the student. These efforts have met with only limited success, perhaps because of the unidimensional character of the teaching approach.
It will therefore be appreciated by those skilled in the art that it would be highly desirable to realize a system for teaching basic money skills to this class of citizens which results in a relatively rapid grasp of the money relationships achieved in such a manner that the system is recallable and available to the student for a lifetime.